Eugenio Montale

“I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?”

“Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.”

“No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.”

“Too many lives are needed to make just one.”

“Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.”

“I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.”

“Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.”

“Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.”

“Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.”